Finishing Off

Tuesday 7th March

Four of us at work today. Some finishing off required at the re-vamped track end of Winchcombe.
Richard C and John P went off to Broadway to pick up a few more of the concrete cable troughs stored there. We need a few more to finish off the cable protection up to the new point motor.
But first a view of all four new signals taken from platform 1:

To make a really smart job of the troughing we cut the ends of two troughs and lids at 45 dig to give us a nice right angled approach to the point motor.

  

There is quite a spaghetti of cables entering and leaving the line side cabinet 

 

So we did a bit more cutting of ports in the troughing to tidy this up a bit. One of the larger cables here is due to be replaced in the near future so we are not going to bury and cover them with ballast until this has been done. Anyway it's looking a lot tidier 

  

Here's   a view of the completed job

 

Having run trains over the re-laid points over the weekend it was necessary to make some adjustments to the settings of the detectors on the point motor. Malcolm W and Neil C tried different  spacer combinations on the stretcher bars to fine tune the seating of the point blades. 

The replacement point motor moves the blades pretty rapidly so it's essential to keep fingers and tools  clear of the gap when it is operating under power ! A hand crank is used to wind the system over  while making these adjustments 

We gave the point motor cover a coat of silver paint to finish off the job - lets hope we have everything set spot on for reliable operation.

Just a quick word to finish off regarding further preparations for Broadway signal box. Malcolm W is sorting out the manufacture of 16 couplings which we need to couple the vertical tappet blades to the electrical locks. Once we have these made we can get on with fitting the locks to the bottom of the locking trays - a fair bit of drilling and bolting required. Here's a picture of the one coupling we are using as a pattern:

 

Curly